Since this is the top comment at the moment: CTF stands for Capture The Flag.

Personally I have never, ever heard that concept referred to by the initialism. Granted, it's almost never come up in my circles, so... shrug

Which acronym do you mean? CTF? I think that acronym, just like BGP, is more well known by itself than what it stands for.

More generally, not every piece of writing is meant for every audience. Like if someone writes a blog post about CTFs aimed at people who like CTFs, nobody in the target audience needs to have CTF explained to them. Ultimately HN is a link aggregator, but sometimes its a bit like eavesdropping on a conversation. When you are just listening in you don't get the full context sometimes.

Apart from everything else people have said in response to this, it's rude to presume that an article has HN as an audience simply by dint of it being available for us to link to. It's totally reasonable for people to write for an audience they know understands these terms.

So, in fact, you must not beg to have authors include courtesy definitions for you. That's not reasonable. Instead, you should simply ask here, on the thread, without complaining about the article.

I think so many acronyms have meaning that isn’t explained by the words that the stand for. The other day I was explaining what CI is and they asked what it stood for; I realized that Continuous Integration is almost completely useless for someone trying to understand what CI actually is

At the same time, I did a search for "what is a ctf to play" and got the answer. We know how to find answers to these problems. I agree the blog post was poor form.

Your two paragraphs are completely contradictory. I agree with the first one.

“hacker” news, ladies and gentlemen

i try not to over feed tangents but this is precisely how i feel every time i speak to someone who is recently enlisted in the military. i have to constantly stop them and be like “i have no idea what you just said” over and over and over again. it’s like trying to make sense of a random bowl of alphabet soup.

Let’s reduce this to absurdity:

I think you only wanted clarification of CTF (Capture the Flag) and not AI (Artificial Intelligence) and not GPT-4 (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer version 4) and not CLI (Command Line Interface) and not MCP (Model Context Protocol) and not LLM (Large Language Model)

Quoting TFA (The Fucking Article): “just adapt bro”

lol at the BGP example

We live in the goddammed future. Huamnity's knowledge is at your fingertips. Right clicking the Nth word of the article and putting in any semblance of effort to learn on your own is too much to ask?

I don't know everything, there's tons of stuff I don't know about, but when I'm at my web browser, the least I can do about something is ask Google about a word or phrase or subject that isn't familiar instead of being spoonfed information like I'm a baby.

[dead]

[dead]